Even though Tableau has been round for a number of years now, there is a dearth of books out there to guide new users. To get the most out of Tableau, you don’t want to approach chart making in the same way that you do in Excel. The videos and webinars that Tableau offers are great, …
Category Archive
for: ‘Data Visualization’
Slopegraphs in Tableau
In Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and recently on his blog, he discusses the use of slopegraphs to show change over time. They are highly effective because you have both the text (the reader would likely want to know the individual values), the sorting, and the slope which allows you to understand the …
Case Shiller House Price Index
Standard and Poor’s Case-Shiller index was released today with disappointing indications of a double-dip recession, at least for the housing market. This provided an excellent opportunity to visualize the data they make public. Below is the seasonally adjusted data for March 2011, going back over two decades. The index is set so that all cities …
Exploring Data in a Single Chart
Chandoo’s excellent Excel and Data blog has a data challenge to win a Kindle. I’m not entering but thought I’d show what Tableau can do with just a few hours of work. The challenge was to create a single chart that showed the data story the best. Below is what I think works, but the …
Unemployment Rates 1982 to 2011: Dorling Cartogram
I’ve updated the Dorling Cartogram on unemployment rates by state to include 2010 and data from April of 2011. As you can see the massive explosion of unemployment rate in 2009 has tempered slightly since then. The data is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and rendered using Protovis. As before, you’ll need an SVG …
Wave Pendulum
I find this… pleasing. Edit: Richard Leeke made a Tableau version (see comments below). Tableau Public doesn’t animate it automatically, so download the workbook to see the effect best. Wave Pendulum Powered by Tableau
Star Ratings in Tableau
I’ve been wanting a star rating chart in Tableau for a while for my Netflix Instant Film Picker. I started out trying to use the Unicode star (★), but that would only provide whole numbers of stars with no resolution in between (if only there was a half star in Unicode…). Instead I resorted to …
Counting Overlapping Marks in Tableau
In the Stem and Leaf Plots post I looked at a way to show overlapping marks in a single axis scatter chart. This post deals with helping the user understand there are multiple points overlapping on a regular scatter chart. Tableau simply plots the marks on top of each other and the resulting tooltip shows …
Stem and Leaf Plots (sorta) in Tableau
In some work I do with specific clients, there is great value in charting the raw data and not letting information be hidden by averages or rates. If I have a single measure (for example ‘Number of acres of land owned’ ) I like to show it on a scatter plot with just one axis. …
Tableau Chart Helper
I found this very helpful compilation of all the chart types you can make with Tableau at Alan Smithee Presents. Alan Smithee is apparently a pseudonym, so it’s unclear if he (she?) works for Tableau, but either way, the compilation is excellent for understanding how to construct the different chart types. There are also some …
